An international guidance document on OTEC is making significant development progress. This document will benefit the whole OTEC community, providing guidance to designers and project developers, and reassuring investors, insurers and national authorities.
The guidance document -IEC TS 62600-20- will be a Technical Specification developed within the Technical Committee TC114 of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
The document will cover land‐based, shelf‐mounted and floating OTEC plants which generate electrical power. It will be applicable to the OTEC structure, process flows and machinery, electrical equipment and controls to the point of interconnection to the primary load or electrical grid.
A first draft of the document has been circulated in January 2017, and commented by the different TC114 participating countries. A project team made of experts from UK, USA, Canada, France and the Netherlands met to work on the standard in March 2017, in parallel to the IEC TC114 Plenary meeting in Madrid. A new version of the document is targeted for the end of 2017. Further information on the standard can be found in the presentation given in Madrid: PT20 – OTEC Presentation Madrid 16th March 2017
This presentation stresses the importance of making use of existing oil and gas expertise as well as the possibility of reusing relatively modern drill ships, semi-submersibles or FPSOs as a base hull for a floating OTEC system. A number of such hulls are going to scrap at present due to the severe downturn in the offshore oil industry. Many of the systems on such vessels such as moorings, thrusters, accommodation, cranes, etc would also be needed on a floating OTEC plant.
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Author: Laura-Mae Macadré, Bureau Veritas
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